- Welcome to "American Black Journal."

I'm your host, Stephen Henderson.

The four-part PBS documentary series, "Great Migrations, People on the Move," continues tonight at nine o'clock here on Detroit PBS.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the host, executive producer, and writer for the series, which focuses on how African-American movement during the 20th and 21st centuries helped shape this country.

Many Southerners migrated to Detroit, of course, through Michigan Central Station.

And I had a chance to moderate a panel discussion at Michigan Central with Dr. Gates and other guests during a screening of the documentary hosted by Ford.

Here's a portion of that conversation.

This is a quote from Jacob Lawrence, who was an African-American painter, a wonderful African-American painter, whose depiction of the Great Migration, in my opinion, is one of the most detailed and one of the most moving, and really was one of the most complete until I saw the series.

And he said, "If at times my productions "don't express the conventionally beautiful, "there's always an effort to express "the universal beauty of man's continuous struggle "to lift his social position and to add dimension "to his spiritual being."

There is something about this work that just makes that quote ring in my mind, this idea of not just lifting social position, but changing your spiritual being, lifting your spiritual being as well.

The migration changes all of us in America, in not just social ways, it expands our spiritual essence and existence.

You only have to spend a little time here in the city of Detroit to experience that.

So I would love to have Skip Gates talk about social and the spiritual change that comes as a result of the migration.

- That's one of the most beautiful comparisons that we could possibly get.

Jacob Lawrence's "Great Migration" series is composed of 40 panels, beautifully rendered in vibrant colors, showing just regular African-Americans coming out of the South and making it up to places like this great train station.

And he had the capacity, though it's in the visual arts, to suggest movement.

In each of those panels, you feel like people really are on the move, but they're not, they're just flat panels.

To understand how dramatic the impact of the "Great Migration" was, imagine six million people being in prison.

Six million people being in prison, and their grandparents were in prison, and their great-grandparents were, and their great-great-grandparents for 300 years.

And all of a sudden, they could rush free and come to the North.

And that's what happened.

And that's why all these brilliant cultural forums came out of that, the energy exuded from the feeling of freedom for the first time.

When you didn't have the Ku Klux Klan on your behind, you know, that you could be a man, you could be a woman, you could aspire, you could have hope, you could have aspiration, you could get a job, make it $5 a day.

Can't beat that.

- I wanna have the filmmakers also talk about the way you put something like this together, the narrative, the detail, and again, the capture of that spiritual change that happens as people come North.

Nayla, I'll start with you.

- You know, as you've heard Skip describe, we were tackling three major migrations over the span of over 100 years.

So this was a lot of history to tackle.

Julie and I, you know, tackled this challenge by trying to tell an arc of transformation and maturation over time.

We, you know, wanted to make sure that we were representing the many cities that people went to.

We honed in on some cities that represented phenomenons around transformation, whether it was economical, like here in Detroit.

You know, Chicago was known as the first promised land, you know, which, I mean, the promised land and the word Exodus, the words that were used were biblical, you know, so it was spiritual in nature.

You know, L.A. was, you know, the furthest people would travel.

And we, you know, wanted to make sure that we touched on that as well.

You know, I think we did our best to include the emotional side of things, the historical side of things, the everyday people, because this was a spiritual movement, or a social and spiritual movement, I should say.

It's not, you know, an organized movement in the civil rights movement.

It's six million individuals made this choice, everyday people who, you know, didn't know what the other side looked like.

- Talk more about picking the cities.

I mean, Detroit is an obvious, I think, choice for this, and the story here is so powerful, and it shapes so much of who we are now, that you couldn't leave it out.

But talk about the other cities that are in here, and why they're important as well.

- Yeah, I mean, in some ways, we picked the low-hanging fruit, because, you know, we didn't, there's only a limited amount of time.

I mean, we wish, there's so many stories we wish we could have told of different cities, but certainly Detroit, we had to tell.

Chicago, of course.

Chicago was the original promised land, and that was, you know, the Chicago Defender really promoted Chicago, and because of the train lines and the central location of Chicago, it just became the place that people wanted to go.

So I think Chicago, definitely.

New York, as Skip has mentioned, just Harlem as this cultural mecca was also such a huge draw, and just as a place of cultural expression, you just, you can't miss New York as being, and the Harlem Renaissance, the migration plays such an important role in the Harlem Renaissance, so that was important.

And then, again, as Nayla mentioned, Los Angeles, because I think people don't think about the West Coast when they think about the Great Migration, and we thought it was important to include, I mean, certainly the Pacific Northwest was also, you know, that was a story we could have told, but we told Los Angeles because that was such a key city, especially from, I think, in Louisiana and certain parts.

And one of the most interesting things I think we realized is the train lines dictated where people ended up, right?

So depending on what state you were from and the train line you had, that's where you went.

So yeah, so those were the cities we ended up focusing on for the Great Migration, and then when we talk about the Reverse Migration, that's the story of Atlanta.

So that's a different- - I wanna talk a little about that Reverse Migration, and I guess how that fits into the narrative of this social and spiritual growth or change.

What drives that in the way that the original Migration North drove people here?

What's the crossover there, Skip?

- Well, the Reverse Migration took place because jobs started disappearing from the Industrial North, moving to the South, right?

Because it was, labor was cheaper, and a lot of other cities started, inner cities started falling apart.

There were the riots, you know, it was all complicated.

White people moved out to the suburbs, the tax base fell apart in places like Detroit.

You all know this story.

Then there were three things that happened that made the South bearable for black people.

So the jobs were there, right?

There was a passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and then the affordability of air conditioning.

And when I say that, my students crack up.

But the South was unbearable.

You know, it was hot, it was humid like the Congo or someplace, right?

And people didn't wanna go back and live in that humid environment.

And the affordability of air conditioning changed, both in cars and in homes, changed the bearability of life in the South.

And all of that added up to the Reverse Migration.

- I think it's also about self-actualization, right?

You know, the knowing that this is a risk to leave my home, leave everything that I've ever known in both migrations, the one where the Southerners were moving to the North and really having this understanding that I can be my best self.

So understanding that human perspective, I think is first and foremost.

But the Reverse Migration is exactly the same.

It's an opportunity to go to places where there is another kind of promise, another kind of promise to be an entrepreneur or be a part of other industries that were growing at the time when our industries weren't as much.

And so I think that self-actualization really recognizes the humanity of both migrations for all people.

- I love that.

- And I would, I think that's very well put.

And to add to the human aspect of things and the spiritual aspects of things, the South has always been the ancestral home of black people.

It's where black identity was born in the U.S. when we were forced here.

And even during the Great Migration, people always felt connected to the South.

They would send their kids there during the summer.

You know, they still had relatives there that they were writing back to.

So there's an emotional aspect to the reverse migration.

Even if you're not moving back to the land where your family lived, black people had a stake in the South.

Black people have a stake in the South because of that history.

And I think people are feeling that ownership and a sense of spiritual, of a spiritual pull to move back and build it.

- One of the reasons it was fascinating for me to make this series is that my family wasn't part of the Great Migration.

My family, we could trace back my family tree.

You know, I do do other series on genealogy, right?

I'm the most, somebody said, you're the most DNA-tested black man in the history of the world.

So we could go back to three sets of my fourth great-grandparents who were free Negroes, as we would say, free people of color.

Two sets were freed by the American Revolution.

Third set on my gate side were freed in 1821.

And you know what they had in common?

They knew each other.

They lived in the same county in Western Virginia, now West Virginia, 30 miles from where I was born 200 years later.

So my family migrated 30 miles down the Potomac River.

(audience laughing) A very unusual black experience, and to be country too, you know.

And don't y'all call me country.

(audience laughing) - Robin, I wanna bring you into the conversation here.

Motown, of course, is a defining, I guess, result of migration into the city of Detroit, and it gets exported all over the world.

But there, you also have this kind of nexus of this Lawrence observation about social position and spiritual growth.

Motown is not just about music and money.

It is, there is that root to it that is about our spirit.

You can't hear the music and not feel something.

- I just wanna comment on, and I'll come back to your question, but comment on the significance of the migration and how it impacted my family.

'Cause my family had a slightly different reason for coming to Detroit from Oconee, Georgia.

It was because my great-grandfather, who's really Barry Gordy Jr., so the Barry Gordy Jr. who founded Motown is really Barry Gordy III.

But Barry Gordy Jr., my great-grandfather, was an entrepreneur.

And an entrepreneur in the South who was making money from timber.

He was a plasterer.

You talk about going back to Georgia, or to the South, being drawn to that space.

Our family has a church that's over 100 years old that my great-grandfather built that today, every September, we go back to visit.

So they came here because my great-grandfather had a check for $2,000 that it wasn't safe to cash in the South.

And so to get away from the Ku Klux Klan and the folks who were threatening his life because of the dollars that they knew he had, he had to get away and come to the North.

And he had a brother who lived in Detroit.

And that brother said, "Come here, "and I have a safe place for you to put your money."

So that's how they got here.

And so the Gordy spirit was always about self-actualization and self-empowerment through business ownership.

And so everything was about owning your own business, making your own money.

So then that leads to what you're talking about.

It was a spiritual journey for this family, and it was always about empowering.

So the music of Motown was about empowering.

The music spoke to the human condition and things that all people, black, white, could relate to.

But it was all connected to that journey.